Conflict & Conflict Resolution

If Joe Biden defeats Donald Trump in November, the question he will face is not whether to restore the liberal international order. It is whether the United States can work with an inner core of allies to promote democracy and human rights while cooperating with a broader set of states to manage the rules-based international institutions needed to face transnational threats.

All is not lost, however. To restore full agency in our quest for freedom and dignity, it is time for the Palestinian leadership to absolve itself of an earlier declaration. The PLO must with haste rethink its 1988 peace initiative —specifically, the willingness to accept a Palestinian state on 22 percent of historic Palestine, under a so-called “two state solution.”

President Trump’s grand plan to invite Kosovo’s President Hashim Thaci and Serbia’s Aleksandar Vucic to meet at the White House on June 27 may be falling apart before it begins, after the Kosovo Specialist Chambers announced on Wednesday indictments against Thaci and others on war crimes charges.

On 8 June, the business cycle dating committee of the National Bureau of Economic Research declared that economic activity in the US had peaked in February 2020, formally marking the start of a recession. But we already knew that we were in a recession that had likely begun around that date. So, why does the NBER’s formal declaration matter?

It is no secret that measures of employment fell sharply from February to March. Real (inflation-adjusted) personal consumption expenditure (PCE) and real personal income before transfers both peaked in February as well. Official measures of GDP are released only quarterly but the economic free-fall in late March was enough to pull first-quarter GDP growth down to an annualized rate of -4.8% (relative to the last quarter of 2019).

Stephen Walt writes that political institutions are not permanent phenomena: they are artificial human creations and only as enduring, adaptive, and effective as people make them. He hopes for a serious and sustained process of democratic change, one that respects the nobler features of the U.S. constitutional order yet addresses all the ways in which The United States has failed to live up to its own professed ideals. The alternative, he fears, will be something much more dangerous. 

Why is France looking for clues as to why they have done less well in the current pandemic than Germany? 

Joseph Nye describes how the United States had lost its soft power before and regained it. He is optimistic about the United States regaining it again.

Speaking with NDR Info, Cathryn Clüver Ashbrook discusses the roots of systemic racism in the U.S. and how the country has changed since the 1960s, when sustained protests shifted the civil rights landscape. She addresses the impact recent events have had on the American political landscape, as measured in recent polls and  discusses the meaning of solidarity protests across the world and their impact on political discourse in the U.S.

Tuesday was primary day in West Virginia, and the Republican-led state government there did something sensible that other states should embrace: They made it easier to cast absentee ballots.

After 400 years of systemic discrimination against black people in America, the volcanic reaction to video of the brutal killing of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis has pushed America to another major inflection point in its seemingly endless struggle with race. Hundreds of thousands of Americans, both black people and allies from other racial identities, have taken to the streets to decry police brutality and systemic discrimination, and to demand change. PolicyCast Host Thoko Moyo welcomes Harvard Kennedy School Professors Khalil Muhammad and Erica Chenoweth for a discussion on the demanded change.